Tag Dreams

Dreamscape

Michael 8 Comments

If you read enough blogs over enough time, you will read at least one dream story from every blogger. Except me. I don’t recall once over the past 14 years and who knows how many posts, that I’ve ever written about my dreams. Or so it seems. Until now.

I’m not one to have recurring dreams. At least not that I know based on the ones I remember. I do have recurring dream themes and they seem to play out like a serial drama, or perhaps like a soap opera. Never really ending but different stories lines coming and going. But the same movie, night after night? Nope. No encore presentations.

But now, for the last few weeks – no, for the last few months, I seem to have hit upon a recurring dream, or else I am experiencing a dream-like occurrence. Every night, at nearly always at 3:15 in the morning, I wake up, check the time, and go back to sleep. There doesn’t seem to be an outside stimulus causing this. No odd noises from outside. Nothing consistent inside like the furnace kicking on at the same time every day. (Who designed furnaces, by the way? Did they specify manufacturers find the loudest switches known to man to activate their heating cycles?)

I thought this over and came up with this assumption. I typically am asleep by 11 and awake by 7, so 3am is my personal “middle of the night.” I may must have developed some cyclic response to my circadian rhythm whereby I wake myself once during the middle of the night to reset whatever needs reset in the sleeping body. It sounded good to me, and I continued along with my jaunty ‘4 hour sleep, short break, 4 hour sleep’ nightly pattern.

Then one day I happened to check the sleep chart on my phone. Although I had a few brief waking moments that I didn’t remember having, the three o’clock hour came and went with me never leaving a sleep state, when I did remember waking up. Did I dream that I was awake checking the clock, then rolling over and resuming my snooze. I checked other days, and found a disbursing pattern of sleep during the very time I knew I was awake? Or was that during the very time I was dreaming that I was awake?

Spooky. Weird. Michael-like. Whatever you call it, I guess I now have a dream story to put out there. If only I knew what it meant.

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Speaking of dreams, did you ever dream about how you connect with others? (Yes, I know that is stretching the bounds of segue-ism. Bear with me.) (Please.) We dream of a world where we all treat each other like members of the same club, players on the same team, kids from the same family. (I told you it was a stretch.) What kind of club would the Human Club look like. We talk about that and what the dues to belong might cost in this week’s Uplift! Check it out. While you’re there, consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

Dreaming what to become

Michael 7 Comments

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been collecting some remarkable tidbits of wisdom (wisbits?) from of all places, the Internet. Someone said (and I’ll qualify this that it is a reputable somebody and was published somewhere reputable, but I’m comfortable in my chair and don’t feel like searching for the citation, but trust me, it’s a valid point) someone once said only 85% of what’s on the Internet is true, and nearly 100% of that is in legacy news sites, or traceable to same. Which if you’re even just decent at math means most of what we’re exposed to is crap. Or possibly plagiarized crap. But there is some interesting crap out there.

One of the non-cited things I saw, that I’m really tempted to believe, is that in the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by releasing a 1/3 pound burger at a lower price, but it failed because people didn’t want the “smaller” burger, even if it was cheaper.

That might be what led Oxford University Press to declare “brain rot” as its 2024 word of the year. The term is defined as “mental decline caused by trivial material.” See, to me, that in itself is somewhat rotten. The mental decline isn’t caused by trivial material. That’s what we used to call recreation. “Let’s take time off and do something non-consequential, something trivial!” The mental decline we’re experiencing is caused by people accepting what they read as fact. But hold that thought.

A different word was selected word of the year for 2024 by that stalwart of unpublished publications, Dictionary.com. They named demure as this year’s word of the day. Of course demure took off this year when some Tik Tok celebrity (really?) started using it in a way that didn’t match the definition. Sort of like when someone wants to sound “educated” at a cocktail party (youngsters, ask your parents) and explain how the new red light at the corner will assuage traffic. Anyway, we now have a word of the day everyone thinks means very mindful when it means shy, modest often affectedly so, or coy, and its origin is a state of calmness at sea.

Remember that thought we held 2 paragraphs ago. That’s where I wrote that I read OUP selected Brain Rot as its word of the day. Plug in “brain rot” to your favorite search engine and it will say it’s the Oxford University Press 2024 word of the year. Now just for fun and giggles, do the same with “demure.” Yep, it will come back as the Oxford University Press 2024 word of the year. 85% right seems high. By the way, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is polarization. That sounds right.

Leaving single words behind, here is a string of words from one of the Today Show social sites attributed to Michael J. Fox. “If you don’t think you have anything to be thankful for, keep looking. Because you don‘t just receive optimism. You can’t wait for things to be great then be grateful for that. You have to behave in a way that promotes that.” There’s an 85% chance he actually said that. Personally, I don’t care if that isn’t what he said, that’s a good thought.

I could end it with that but here’s something from a nondescript post that should be on all our walls. “We dream what we wish to become.” I wish we’d all become less brain rotted.

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Not everyone can be exceptional and have the word of the year culled from one of your TicToc posts, but everyone can take pride in the exceptional qualities they possess. Even the most average of people have the most remarkable moments.

We took an above average swipe at those who feel being average is no better than having failed in the latest Uplift, Life on the Curve. You can read it on average in about 3 minutes.

But before you go look, have you still not thought about joining the ROAMcare community and have the weekly Uplift blog delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website? In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly a Monday Moment of Motivation, and our email exclusive Friday Flashback repost of one of our most loved publications. All free and available now at  ROAMcare.org.

Let Me Sleep on That

Michael Leave a comment

I had a great idea for a blog post. Unfortunately, I had it while I was asleep. Maybe “great idea” isn’t quite the right way to put that. Everything I post is real, hence the title “The Real Reality Show Blog.” This is really real. But not everything is blogworthy. (By the way, did you know that “blogworthy” passes the spell-check test? That could be blogworthy in itself.) And not everything that is blogworthy lends itself to a blog. But enough times, something happens that makes a great post. And then something happens to actually make me able to write about it.

Sometimes that something is a bit of work. I mull it over, run it through my brain, try out a phrase or two, and somehow remember it when I sit down in front of the computer where it can fall out of my head through my fingers onto the screen. One of those times was sometime last week. It was a great idea and it just about wrote itself completely in my head. Had I had a computer in front of me I could have walked away with a completed post in just a few minutes. But what I had in front of me was a pair of closed eyelids. And behind them was what turned out to be a faulty memory.

I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking or dreaming or meditating or whatever it is one does on the edge of sleep. All I remember is that I woke up thinking “that would be a great blog!” I just had no idea what “that” was.

Some people can remember every little thing they dream. They’re probably the same persons who know everything that is in their refrigerators. They can relate them at lunch to everybody at the office in excruciating detail.  (That would be their dreams, not their refrigerator contents but probably those, too.) On particularly good days they even come with critiques of the main characters in their mental movies. I can do that only if I have a particularly spicy enchilada with multiple beers after 9pm. Then I either wake up remembering my dreams or remembering an actual altercation in the parking lot between my untied shoe and a telephone pole. Neither makes for a great idea for a blog post although the shoe lace bear some promise.

So whatever it was it isn’t going to be. And instead of a great blog post, you get this. Sorry.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Subconsciously Yours

Michael Leave a comment

Does anybody have any idea what our minds actually do while we are sleeping? Let me explain. Since I got out of the hospital my body has taken revenge for all those weeks that I ignored it and is making life challenging. Perhaps due to the rigors of physical therapy and a twice daily set of exercises designed to satisfy the Marquis de Sade, I am asleep every night by 8pm, up again around 2am for an hour or so, then back to sleep until 6 or 7. It’s during that second phase that the mind is now joining the body in a quest to make me wake up most mornings with “huh?” on my mind.

I rarely remember my dreams. Sometimes I’ll get a snippet of the movie my sleeping subconscious played for me, but most often I wake up blissfully ignorant of what went on inside my head those few hours. All that has changed recently.

Now I’m waking with vivid details of the sleep show. And I’ve figured out where they are coming from. One recent day I heard Pinball Wizard on the radio. I recall that iconic rock opera as one of my favorites from overture to finale. Throughout the day I was humming and singing (just to myself in my head) that famous modern aria. The next morning I arose fairly exhausted from having been chased by a silver ball in a life-size pinball machine never finding the drain that would have saved me from exhaustion.

A day or two of returned blissful ignorance and then it happened again. I was reading a novel, a favorite past-time, but was really too sleepy to have been reading with any concentration. As a result I kept reading the same passage over and again. I was at the part in the story where the good guy had chased the bad guy to a concert hall then to the concert hall’s basement, then to its sub-basement. Sure enough, the next morning found me waking wondering how I had become the good guy and chased the bad guy through several sub-basements including a fruit cellar, wine stores, utility rooms, a secret laboratory, a bomb shelter, fur storage, and garage. When I finally cornered the villain trying to hotwire a 40 year old MG Midget he surrendered and we rode an escalator back to the surface.

Then there was the day I read in the paper about the upcoming art show in the city and woke up the next morning having wondered why I was painting a geometric abstract including the use of a carpenter’s square and a hand held scientific calculator straight out of the 1970s. And I was painting this masterpiece from inside the canvas.

So you can see why I’m leery of going to bed at all tonight having spent the day craving ice cream. I guess I should wear my flannel pajamas – just in case.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?